American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier - Hardcover

Griffin, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809095157 ISBN 13: 9780809095155

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2007

Synopsis

The war that raged along America’s frontier during the period of the American Revolution was longer, bloodier, and arguably more revolutionary than what transpired on the Atlantic coast.
 
Between 1763 and 1795 westerners not only participated in a War of Independence but engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in social relations, political allegiances, and assumptions about the relationship between individuals and society. On the frontier, the process of forging sovereignty and citizens was stripped down to its essence. Settlers struggled with the very stuff of revolution: violence, uncertainty, disorder, and the frenzied competition to remake the fabric of society. In so doing, they were transformed from deferential subjects to self-sovereign citizens as the British Empire gave way to the American nation. But something more fundamental was at work. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement in which race and citizenship went hand in hand. The common people demanded as much, and the state delivered. As westerners contended in a Hobbesian world, they also created some of the myths that made America American.
 
Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials, vying with one another to remake the West during its most formative period.

About this title

About the Author:

Patrick Griffin is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction Tom Quick’s Monument  From the Seven Years’ War through the American Revolution and until the Whiskey Rebellion, a frontiersman haunted the American imagination. Growing up on the Pennsylvania frontier as the eldest of ten, Tom Quick was one of those faceless, poorer men squatting or holding small tracts and struggling to achieve competency. Something, however, set him apart from his neighbors: Tom Quick had pledged to exterminate every Indian he came across. Before 1763, he did not seem destined to become an Indian slayer. Like many young boys on the frontier, he hunted, fished, and played with young Delawares in the woods around the cabin his father had built, counting them among his closest friends. That is until the end of the French and Indian War, when a young Delaware shot and scalped his father, stripping him of his silver cuff links and shoe buckles. His father’s murder transformed Tom Quick. “The blood of the whole Indian race,” he reputedly declared, “is not sufficient to atone for the blood of my father.” Tom Quick then promised to kill a hundred Delawares before he died.1 Quick killed Indians hunting, sleeping, eating, and drinking. He shot, tomahawked, stabbed, and bludgeoned Indians. He pushed Indians off of cliffs. He slaughtered them when sober and when drunk. He butchered men, women, and children, as well as whole families. As he put it after he had “dashed out the brains” of an infant, “Nits make lice.” He preyed on some close to his home, including the Delaware who had scalped his father, and ambushed others far away. During the American Revolution, he roamed frontier regions like the Ohio River valley in search of Indians but not as a patriot. Quick refused to join any militia. He would not support the British, either. Disaffected from any cause, he used the chaos of the period as a license to kill. Quick’s reign of terror continued after the United States gained its independence as westerners still struggled with violence. Although proclaimed a monster by officials in these years, in the estimation of common settlers he seemed to stand alone against the indifference of government. In a world of all against all, in which civil society had ceased to exist, only he and his ilk could impose some sort of order. In particular, his unapologetic individualism appeared the only solution to incessant Indian raids. When authorities captured Quick, no jail could hold him because other frontier folks who had lost friends and relatives on the “dark and bloody ground” that the frontier had become came to his rescue. Quick’s spree ended in 1795. As legend had it, he had slaughtered ninety-nine Delawares when he fell ill with—ironically—smallpox. As he lay dying, he pleaded with his family to drag one last Indian before the foot of his bed within rifle range. By 1795, however, few Indians lived on the Pennsylvania frontier. When Quick made his final request, some sense of order had come to the West as the violence and uncertainty that had gripped the region for decades had ended. So, too, had the presence of Indians in places like the Ohio valley. Quick died one Indian short of his grisly goal. After Quick’s death, his legend grew as westerners embellished stories of his vow, his guile, and the many Indians he had killed. The tale began to take even more extraordinary twists. One story that circulated transformed Quick into a deus ex machina, rescuing families under attack from Indians in the nick of time. In one such telling, he arrived breathless to confront and kill a few Indians besieging a house just as the father inside, low on ammunition, was preparing to sacrifice his own children and take his own life rather than see them suffer at the hands of “savages.” Another tale that made the rounds after he had died went something like this: After Quick was buried, a starving Indian came across the grave, dug up the body, and ate the liver. He then died of smallpox, a fitting end for the hundredth victim. Similar legends had whole villages wiped out by the diseased liver. In tales such as these, Quick achieved in death and a time of peace what he could not in life and a period of war. By the early nineteenth century, easterners were reading romanticized accounts of stories like the Quick myth as books and pamphlets appeared cataloging the exploits of frontiersmen. In these years, the ideas of “frontier” and “revolution” enthralled Americans. In many ways, together they epitomized who Americans were, capturing invented notions of collective self carved from memory, shared experience, and circumstance.2 Less than a generation after the Revolution, writers extolled the virtues of the frontier and the critical role of the American Revolution—as well as the violence that was their hallmark—in creating the democratic and civilized man. Writers like James Eldridge Quinlan, who published a popular tract on the Quick myth, conceived of places like the Ohio valley at the time of revolution as American crucibles, regions where broader national dynamics writ small could be observed.3 The Ohio valley continued to fascinate nineteenth-century Americans much as it had less than a generation before when Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin invested in its land, believing like most of their fellow citizens that America’s future lay there. With its promise of land and independence, it still attracted the most mobile men and women from the margins of society in the East, as well as speculators and financiers. Now peaceful, it had been contested country. The Ohio valley had once been home to other immigrants, most notably Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingoes, and it witnessed appalling violence before, during, and after the American Revolution. As Americans as a whole understood, the region and its varied peoples featured in the rise and fall of British empire in America before the war and in the fortunes of the American nation after the war. By the early nineteenth century, in other words, the history of what had been one of Tom Quick’s hunting grounds for many defined the character of American character. With time, Americans elevated the likes of Tom Quick to sacrosanct status. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Quick tall tale had been rediscovered and had become the subject of popular books and even a play titled Tom Quick, the Avenger; or, One Hundred for One. Its author claimed Quick took his vow to defend the defenseless and out of regard for the memory of a father savagely executed: By the point of the knife in my right, and the deadly bullet in my left; By heaven and all there is in it, by earth and all there is on it; By the love I bore my father, here on his grave I swear eternal vengeance against the whole Indian race. I swear to kill all, to spare none; The old man with the silver hair, The lisping babe without teeth, the mother quick with child, and the maid in the bloom of youth shall die. A voice from my father’s grave cries Revenge! Eternal revenge!4 According to another account, Quick was “the very ideal of strength,” tall, powerful, agile, and bright, an individual untethered from society. He was “rather a rough-looking representative of the early settlers” of the frontier. Standing against the malice of the wealthy, the indifference of government, and savagery, he defined the virtues of the common man. In 1889, Pennsylvanians gathered in his hometown to erect a monument topped with a nine-foot-tall Passaic zinc obelisk dedicated to “the memory of Tom Quick, the Indian slayer, the Avenger of the Delaware.” The unveiling ceremony, which The New York Times covered the following day under the headline “In Honor of Tom Quick,” took place amid fanfare after the erection of a liberty pole and speeches by prominent locals.5 The monument, of course, memorialized a myth, not a man. Yet the men and women gathered to celebrate Tom Quick saw in him all that the American Revolution still meant. Quick epitomized the triumph of civilization and democratic values over savagery. Although he had sacrificed innocents, he did so in the service of a broader white civilization. He was its leading edge, society’s unrefined precursor and necessary evil. Late-nineteenth-century Pennsylvanians were not alone in finding meaning in men like Quick. The historians and cultural icons George Bancroft and Frederick Jackson Turner, who were writing as frontier legend captured the attention of Americans, also believed that the American Revolution fulfilled a destiny and that the frontier created a distinctive people, uncontaminated by the trappings of hereditary power, relentless class conflict, and vexing ethnic questions that dogged the Old World. If the Revolution signaled the arrival of a distinctively conceived nation, the frontier provided the requisite labor. As Turner explained, on this unforgiving line between savagery and civility, men and women developed those traits most closely associated with Americanness. They did so by taming a place and conquering the savage peoples who inhabited it. Better considered a process than a place, the frontier taught settlers the lessons of democracy. Here, out of necessity, they discovered the virtues of self-reliance and freedom from the dictates of government. Fighting Indians and scrambling to survive, in other words, created the conditions for the...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0809095157
• ISBN 13: 9780809095155
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384